Thanks to Claudia for
putting questions together Discussion Questions
1.What
feelings did this book evoke for you?
2.
What do you think the author’s purpose was in writing this book? What ideas was
he or she trying to get across?
3.
What did you already know about this book’s subject before you read this book?
4.
What new things did you learn?
5.
What else have you read on this topic, and would you recommend these books to
others?
6.
What aspects of the author’s story could you most relate to?
7.
Of all the information presented in the book, what has stayed you the
most?
8.
Share a favorite quote from the book. Why did this quote stand out?
QUOTES
“White
women can oscillate between their gender and their race, between being the
oppressed and the oppressor. Women of color are never permitted to exist
outside of these constraints: we are both women and people of color and we are
always seen and treated as such.”
“Women
of color are rarely given the benefit of the doubt and even more rarely
considered worthy of sympathy and support. If we are angry it is because we are
bullies, if we are crying it is because we are indulging in the cult of
victimhood, if we are poised it is because we lack emotion, if we are emotional
it is because we are less rational human and more primitive animal.”
“Women
of color have to not only battle white patriarchy and that of their own
culture, but must also contend with colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism,
and other forms of racism. Given white women have never had to deal with racial
and colonial oppression, it is not surprising — though it is certainly
regrettable — that so many of them still regard feminism as a movement purely concerned
with gender, leaving racialized women to keep trying to draw their attention to
the ways in which various oppressions affect our lives. Until white women
reckon with this, mainstream Western feminism cannot be anything more than
another iteration of white supremacy.”
“White people are not united by a shared ethnicity. They are
united by access to institutional power.”
“Gas-whiting”
“This
weaponization of White Womanhood continues to be the centerpiece of an arsenal
used to maintain the status quo and punish anyone who dares challenge it.”
“A
white woman may well be punished for an emotional outburst when interacting
with men, but if she is engaged in a terse interaction with a woman of color
and she becomes emotional, by which I mean either angry or distraught, with or
without actual tears, the deeply embedded notions of gender and femininity are
triggered and it is the white woman who is likely to be vindicated.”
“White
women’s tears are fundamental to the success of whiteness. Their distress is a
weapon that prevents people of color from being able to assert themselves or to
effectively challenge white racism and alter the fundamental inequalities built
into the system.”
“Those
tears may well be genuine, but that does not make them innocent and harmless:
the opposite in fact.”
“There
is no sisterhood. How can there be, when white supremacy has done such a
thorough job of setting White Womanhood apart from the rest of us? There’s a
division, all right, but it is not caused by us. Yes,”
“Trying
to reason with whiteness is akin to reasoning with a clinical narcissist who
refuses to go to therapy: frustratingly impossible because the untreated
narcissist simply does not have the requisite tools to see themselves as
anything other than “good,”
“In
the aftermath of the 2016 election, many feminists and writers both in and out
of the United States (including myself), who were expecting a vastly different
outcome, concluded that white women who voted for Trump had chosen to side with
their race over their gender, that they prioritized whiteness over sisterhood.”
“White
women share the same racial characteristics as white men and so are more easily
able to transcend gender-based oppression. Their proximity to white men gives
them, as Lorde pointed out, access to rewards for identifying with patriarchy
when it suits them.”
“Feminism
is not immune to this. For should we fail to keep up our end of the unspoken
bargain, should we tug at the invisible leash that whiteness and white feminism
have secured around our necks, then that solidarity is revoked and White
Womanhood ensures it is always us, and never them, who pay the price for speaking
out. Turns out, they too saw us as threats all along.”
“Many
Arabs have fair skin, and my own is more olive than brown. This racial
ambiguity affords me some degree of acceptance—until my ethnic background is
inevitably brought to the foreground. Whiteness, then, is more than skin color.
It is, as race scholar Paul Kivel describes, “a constantly shifting boundary
separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from”
“curly,
waist-length brown hair. One at her workplace “kept touching my hair, pulling
my curls to watch them bounce back. Rubbing the top. So when I told her to stop
and complained to HR [human resources] and my supervisor, she complained that I
wasn’t a people person or team member and I had to leave that position for being
‘threatening’ to a coworker.”
“That
even as we agitate against the sexism of a male-dominated society, because it
is also a white-dominated society we are also assailed with racism, and often
this comes from white women who turn their sanctioned victim status on us.
White women can oscillate between their gender and their race, between being
the oppressed and the oppressor.”
“Make
a note of just how often a woman of color who stands her ground, demands
respect, or gives anything less than overwhelmingly positive affirmation to
others is met with harsh rebuke and swift ostracism.”
“The
Taliban emerged from former U.S. allies the mujahideen (“holy warriors”), who
were partly funded by the United States in order to counter the Soviet invasion
in 1979. There is a Western tendency to view Islamist extremism as intrinsic to
Islam and as popular among Muslims, but groups such as the Taliban enjoyed only
very minimal support from the Afghan population before the war against the
Soviets.”
“Black
historian Deborah Gray White explains that the Jezebel archetype was
constructed as the mirror opposite to the ideal Victorian-era lady of the
house. Godless and promiscuous, “she did not lead men and children to God;
piety was foreign to her. She saw no advantage in prudery, indeed domesticity
paled in importance before matters of the flesh.”
“Historian
Liz Conor notes the hypocrisy of the sudden flurry to “protect” Aboriginal
women from alleged abuse from Japanese pearlers given there had been “decades
of unheeded reports of violence toward Aboriginal women by white pearling
masters.” Whereas any accusations made against white men had long been
dismissed through the rhetoric of “black velvet” that regarded Aboriginal women
as incapable of virtue and chastity,”
“The
rape and exploitation of enslaved black women was not just rampant, it was endemic.
The writings of former slaves such Harriet Jacobs, as well those of sympathetic
white women like abolitionist Sarah Grimké, paint a picture of black girls in
their early teens getting routinely bribed with presents and “favors,” such as
promises of better treatment, for agreeing to sex with white plantation workers
or relatives of the owner.”
“In
India, antipathy toward darker skin is so rife that a recent study found that
70 percent of both male and female respondents wanted to date a fair-skinned partner.”
“The
abuse of black women served at least three functions: it terrorized the black
population in order to reinforce white domination, it provided a source of
continuous labor, and it was a sexual outlet that white men took advantage of
in order to maintain the illusion of the moral superiority of white society in
an era of supposed sexual chastity.”
“In
what seems a classic case of projection, the ostensibly sexually uptight and
moralistic Europeans transferred their own anxieties about sex onto the bodies
and minds of Africans. This projection would not only cement the image of the
Lewd Jezebel in the minds of white society, but it continues to reverberate”
“There
were consensual relationships and transactions, though these were often not honored
by the white men. “From the time white men invaded our shores, Indigenous
women’s sexuality was … represented as something to be exploited and
mythologized,” Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes”
“Violence
against Aboriginal women was not prosecuted: in a scenario that may sound all
too familiar to many women today, one newspaper reported that the rape,
torture, and murder of an Aboriginal woman in the late 1800s was not prosecuted
because the effects would be too detrimental … to the lives of the four white
men responsible.”
“Prior
to 9/11, Arab American comedian Dean Obeidallah did not see his Palestinian
heritage as pertinent to his life; he felt and was treated as “white.”
Following the attacks, however, his Arab heritage became an issue for others if
not for him, prompting him to perform a stand-up routine on how he “went to bed
a white guy” the night before 9/11 and “woke up an Arab” the morning after.”
“I’d
be lying if I said I knew how to reconcile all this. I’m well aware of the
racism and colorism in Arab societies, of the Filipina and other Asian maids
mistreated by their rich employers in the Gulf states who regard them more as
indentured servants than hired help. It did not escape my notice on a trip back
to Lebanon that the workers cleaning the windows”
“Unlike
enslaved black women, Native women were not represented as lewd wantons, but
they were nonetheless sexualized and stereotyped through the Princess
Pocahontas myth. More than just a Disney princess, Pocahontas was a real woman
in history whose story has been appropriated almost beyond all recognition.”
“Arab
is not even a racial or ethnic category; rather, it denotes a supposed shared
culture and language. But the dialects and cultures vary significantly across
the region, making the word Arab itself, as an identifier, a testament to the
inadequacy of our racial literacy”
“The
Princess Pocahontas myth represents a passive sex symbol, the “Good Indian” who
unites the white man and the Native, the civilized and the savage, the past and
the future. But—and this is a big but—through her attraction to white men she
also affirms the superiority of white society over her own, and so functions as
tacit permission for whites to conquer, assimilate, and destroy Native culture.
Even her “princess” status was a fabrication”
“What
does it mean to be an Arab in a region where persecution is often based not on
race or ethnicity but on religious sect? What does it mean to be an Arab when
your lands were colonized first by the Arabians, then by the Ottomans, then by
the Europeans, and finally, along with the rest of the world, by capitalism
itself?”
“As
the young, sexy, virginal, and animal-like mediator, Pocahontas represents the
feminized and inferior Native’s willingness to be dominated, penetrated (quite
literally), and civilized by the superior masculine white society, as though
agreeing to her own erasure and demise.”
“I
mean, she is a cartoon, we are real people, we don’t fucking talk to raccoons
and trees!” Angel joked, exasperated. What’s no joke, however, are the real
consequences this archetype has had. The sexualizing and animalizing of Native
women through the perpetuation of the Princess Pocahontas myth is occurring in
a context where violence against Native women is increasing.”
“The
lingering legacy of Princess Pocahontas—the willing exotic princess who chooses
intrepid and strapping white suitors and white society over her static, dying
culture and community with its unattractive, war-minded men—is a false
construction that conveniently gives consent for the eradication of her
people.”
“The
quintessential China Doll is submissive, eager to please, obedient, and
permanently pleasant, and lives for no reason other than to make her white
lover happy. Nowhere has she been embodied quite so roundly as in the
most-performed opera in the United States today, Puccini’s classic Madama
Butterfly, based on a one-act play that was in turn based on an 1887 smash-hit
semiautobiographical French”
“This
image has so dominated Western views of Southeast Asian women that it became a
key driver of Thailand’s sex industry. Sex tours of Southeast Asia remain
hugely popular among white men, which ensures that the distorted image of Asian
women persists.”
“For
centuries, the West has regurgitated representations of colonized women that
came to be accepted as more real than the real. Jezebels. Black velvet. Harem
girls. China Dolls. Princess Pocahontas. All of these reduced complex human
beings to cardboard cutout sexual objects without agency and whose surrendered
sexuality was de facto justification for white supremacy.”
“What
does it mean for the rest of us that white women can quietly control almost all
of the weapons belonging to the world’s most powerful country and still claim
to be oppressed in the same way as other women?”
“The
younger cousin of the Angry Black Woman, the Angry Brown Woman is not critical:
she is vitriolic. She does not disagree: she attacks. She is not confident: she
is aggressive. She is not assertive: she is scary. She is, by sheer virtue of
her inherent nature, permanently, well, angry—not because of anything that has
been done to her, mind you, but simply because that is what she is.”
“In
doing so, it betrays an unspoken implication that they don’t really belong
there, they don’t play fair, and everything they’ve achieved can be explained
by their lack of emotional attachment and their willingness to use, abuse, and
discard white Western men—an absurdly inverse relationship to the historical
reality.”
“One
of them was Josefa Segovia, the only woman ever to be lynched in California.
She had killed a white man who was part of a group who’d broken into her home
and attempted to rape her. Given the emphasis on women’s virtue, the successful
defense of her honor by a married woman should have resulted in praise.”
“To
aid this expansion, Mexicans were depicted in newspapers and films as
all-around uncouth people. The men were criminals, dim-witted, dirty, and
untrustworthy, and the women were singled out—in shades of the Dragon Lady—as
sexually manipulative, cunning, promiscuous, and without morals.”
“This
is no shade on those actresses: they are who they are. The problem is when
their appearance is used to reduce millions of women of the various races and
ethnicities that populate the twenty-one countries that make up Latin America
into one hot-blooded sex symbol. Not only does this erase the racial complexity
of the region, it leaves real-life Latinas anxious about their looks and their
behavior as they struggle to either”
“sexless,
unattractive workhorse who was relegated to the kind of manual work that white
women were considered too highly prized for.”
“Arab
women came to be seen as they are largely seen today: sexually repressed,
frigid, virginal, burdened by virtue, shame, and family honor, and more or less
silenced—ironically, pretty much the things that supposedly made white women so
special for so long.”
“To
him a free woman was nonetheless subordinate to a man, but she was subordinate
in the right—white—way. Even for Western women, higher education (as well as
suffrage) was so vehemently opposed by so many white men for so long because
any attempts to transgress the man/woman binary was considered not only a
threat to white patriarchy but to Western civilization.”
“Readers
are likely familiar with many of the Islamophobic tropes that have dominated
Western perceptions of Muslims since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Regarding Muslims as natural-born terrorists, the tropes regurgitate images of
them as irrational, dirty, bloodthirsty, stupid, emotional, immature, violent,
fanatical, subjugated, oppressed, and manipulative.”
“When
actors from Arab backgrounds make it to our cinema and television screens in
non-stereotypical roles, their ethnicity is almost always whitewashed: How many
people are aware that Catherine Keener, Salma Hayek, and Wendy Malick have some
Arab ancestry? Apart from Bohemian Rhapsody’s Rami Malek and Aladdin’s Mena
Massoud, there is a dearth of openly Arab/Middle Eastern actors”
“This
has created a highly skewed perception of Arab women that relegates us to what
I call “Pets or Threats”: we are positioned as helpless, repressed victims
without agency or a voice worth listening to, desperately in need of a white
savior to rescue us from the clutches of our Bad Arab kin; or we are Bad Arabs
ourselves, threats that must be contained and kept in our place. If we are not
one, we must be the other.”
“The
coldhearted Dragon Lady uses her sexuality to deceive and destroy. The Spicy
Sexpot’s curves and broken English take the smoke out of her fire. The Bad Arab
is judged by the sex she supposedly doesn’t have and the sensuality she is cut
off from feeling.”
“The
fear of Black Peril—the name whites gave to the specter of black male sexual
desire for white women—was so wildly disproportionate to the actual threat that
historians now regard it as a kind of psychopathology.”
“These
three factors—that she was single, ran a café in an undesirable area, and
admitted to drinking alcohol—combined in the eyes of the court to make her a
prostitute unworthy of protection.”
“That
financially independent and sexually active single women were excluded from the
“protected” class indicates that Black Peril was about controlling white women
as well as subduing the black population.”
“In
truth, sexual access to enslaved black women was a key way of producing more
slave labor for personal use and for profit.”
“Sex
work, if it has not yet been made abundantly clear, was reviled not so much
because it implied dubious ethical character as because it allowed white women
a degree of independence that most could not access.”
“Lynching
was driven partly by the fear of interracial relationships between white women
and black men and the impact mixed-race offspring would have on white
supremacy.”
“Segregation,
lynching, and Black Peril all occurred for the same reasons: to keep white men
on top. White society, then, hinged on the myth of “protecting” white women
from rape, but in reality, what they were really “protected” from was their own
liberation and any capacity to form meaningful relationships with people of
color.”
“And
so “white damsel” as an archetype was one of racial purity, Christian morality,
sexual innocence, demureness, and financial dependence on men all rolled into
one. A privilege, yes, but a perilous one, for to step off this pedestal meant
no longer being regarded as a “woman.”
“In
other words, the suffragists, even as they were agitating for their own rights,
were still complicit in the oppression of those with less power and status than
them, including black women.”
“You
stay in your place, and I stay in mine, then I get to claim you as my friend,
you’re my coworker, see how I’m not racist? But [only] as long as you don’t
challenge my identity and my position.”
“When
broader society refuses to validate women of color, it becomes vital for us to
share our experiences with each other as a means of coping with these damaging
stereotypes and archetypes, and to help us recognize the gaslighting techniques
and stereotypes that keep us in a subordinate position.”
“their
triggers are words like ‘tribe’ and ‘namaste,’” Sharyn Holmes, the diversity
consultant in Queensland from Chapter 2 tells me. “Namaste” is a Sanskrit word
that has been popularized in Western yoga classes. Although Indians and other
Hindus use it as a common greeting, Western yoga has transformed it into
something more mystical”
